Milton Avery 1885 - 1965

Associated American Artists, New York and Beverly Hills, California
Richard Gray Gallery, Chicago, Illinois
Acquired by the present owners' parents from the above, 1973

Chicago, Illinois, Ricahrd Gray Gallery, Milton Avery: 1885-1965, November - December 1966, no. 15

Very good condition, unlined, some craquelure in white vase which Simon Parkes has advised that lining the painting will reduce its visibility substantially, faint diagonal scratch in brown door. Under UV: fine.
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Milton Avery was largely self-taught, gaining strength and knowledge through trial and error and developing as an artist through his own emotional and visual perception of nature rather than following themes already established by European modernists. Avery is well-known for his figural works, in which he depersonalizes the physiognomy of the figure and exaggerates body parts, distorting the human form while exploring arrangements of shapes and color in his compositions. His recognizable forms are conveyed with a minimum of lines, creating a structural simplicity rooted in design rather than reality. Avery was a master draughtsman and based his large figural works like Woman at Telephone, painted in 1948, on his myriad figural drawings. He filled his sketchbooks with images and color notations during the weekly sketch classes he attended in Greenwich Village and regular sessions with artist friends where he sketched directly from a model. These quickly drawn figures are somewhat more literal than the paintings he would later develop from them, but it was in these preliminary drawings that Avery first simplified the individual characteristics of the figure.

A number of Avery's figural compositions featured either his wife Sally or daughter March, often in conversation with one another, reading or playing cards. They were generally interior scenes featuring the intimate setting of the artist's home; objects and furniture from the Avery's apartment appear repeatedly in his paintings. The telephone table in Woman at Telephone is a subject he approached more than once, and another version of the table appears in Morning Call (1946, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden). In the present picture, Avery has constructed a rigorously conceived design using flat shapes fitted together like a jigsaw puzzle. His palette of bold flat colors allowed him an economic use of line, while areas of patterning further enliven the composition. These color choices and articulated patterns in Avery's intimate interior settings have often been discussed in relationship to Henri Matisse, however, the two artists mostly shared similar aesthetic conceits, treating their figures and landscapes as pure explorations of pattern and arrangements of color. As Breeskin discussed "to both of them composition was the art of arranging in a decorative manner the different elements chosen to express their feeling. Above all, color was to be expressive, the choice of colors being intuitive, not based on any color theories or charts."  Avery's contemporary critic Clement Greenberg also contrasted Avery's connection to the French Fauves who "were usually ready to sacrifice the facts of nature for a happy decorative effect; whereas ... [Dove, Hartley, and Avery] tended to let the decorative effect go when it threatened to depart too much from the facts. It was in the facts primarily that they found inspiration. ... Avery in particular... preserves the local, nameable identity of his subject" ("Milton Avery," Art and Culture, 1961, p. 168).